Luck and entrepreneurship: Is there a connection?

Luck does play a role in business, but when you start talking about luck in entrepreneurship, you can never attribute too much credit for success to the fortune's wheel.

When a person becomes an entrepreneur by deciding to start a business, he is acting on an opportunity that he believes will satisfy a need for both consumers (a product or service) and themselves (independence, wealth, fame).

Success can be attributed to being lucky by starting the right business at the right time. However, the owner would not start a business if he/she didn't believe an opportunity to create something profitable isn't there. That's not luck, it's common sense, you Smart Alecs!

Luck means that a variable is random and the outcome just happens to be positive purely by chance. Successful entrepreneurs aren't successful because they rolled dice but because they took a lot of careful and calculated decisions, and had enough motivation to take action at a point in time.

They saw opportunity, the chance to be and decided to go for it given they had the skills to make it happen. One is not successful because lady luck smiles on them, one's business booms because one is opportunistic at the right time.

Most failed businesses flop because the owner was opportunistic at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Entrepreneurs write their own destiny by making choices that lead to actions and those who make the right choices at the right time earn their successes.

For most entrepreneurs, it's a combination of working your tail off, being in the right place at the right time, by having the guts to approach highly ranked people in the industry, and/or by taking advantage of available contests and grants.

And that phrase – "you'll never know what you can do if you don't try" should be (it probably already is) a part of every entrepreneur's vocabulary.

Most successful entrepreneurs have three things in common.

1) spotting a market by either being in the right place at the right time or just by hard work and making sure they are well informed on many different markets and seeing possible trends and opportunities.

2) having a risk personality so that they are more likely to seize that opportunity and

3) having the skills to manage that opportunity with regards to putting in place the finance and marketing. With a strong focus to achieve their goals, they make sure it happens despite any pitfalls along the way.

The old saying -- the harder you work, the luckier you get -- is indeed very appropriate.